Value Stream Mapping

Value stream mapping, also called material and information flow mapping, is a lean-management method that diagrams every step a product or process takes from start to customer delivery, in order to analyze the current state of a process and design an improved future state. The technique grew out of the Toyota Production System and the broader lean manufacturing movement, and researchers Daniel T. Jones and Yasuhiro Monden helped formalize the waste-identification frameworks it draws on, while its standardized set of symbols for representing materials, information and process steps made the method usable across many different industries. Practicing it typically means building two diagrams, a current-state map produced by directly observing existing operations and a future-state map showing how the process should work after improvement, with value-adding steps conventionally placed along the horizontal center of the map and non-value-adding steps set off to the side; though it began in manufacturing, value stream mapping is now also applied in logistics, healthcare, software development and administrative processes.